New Modes of Creative Writing Research

As university creative writing programmes mature, creative writing research has the potential to develop its own new and distinct theoretical frameworks. Non-traditional and interdisciplinary modes of research may help researchers to address the myriad questions creative writers face — questions of process versus product, audience versus profit, quality versus marketability, theory versus output, criticism versus creativity, inspiration versus analysis, etc. This chapter presents the epistemology of statistical market research as a detailed example of one possible kind of ‘new’ creative writing research and challenges creative writing researchers to construct additional theoretical frameworks by utilising processes of interdisciplinary induction and innovation.